Hacker News Reader

Comment by binarysolo | Hacker News Reader

Can't comment on the macroeconomic trends, but personally as a consumer, hotels are more attractive than AirBNBs for <1-week stays due to cleaning fee and chore lists ($250 cleaning fee per stay, still have to clean up the house and pack the garbage out). Most of my travel is solo for work for 2-3 days so this nudges me towards hotels.

For 1+ week stays AirBNBs make more sense (family vacay, larger house with children), though it seems like the house owner lists the same house on VRBO and for whatever reason prices it slightly cheaper there, so I just book it at the cheaper place.

View on HN

Hotels win for some intersection of short-duration-of-stay and low guest count (with the break-even point varying somewhat as both those figures vary)

AirBnB wins for longer stays with more guests, or if you want to stay somewhere without hotels (but with houses) and also don't want to camp.

Stopping one night on a leg of a long drive, not really doing anything in the room except sleeping for a few hours: hotel/motel tends to win by a long shot. Staying somewhere for several nights with a family of 4+ or a group of friends or something: AirBnB (and similar services) tends to win.

> Stopping one night on a leg of a long drive, not really doing anything in the room except sleeping for a few hours: hotel/motel tends to win by a long shot.

Unless your co-traveller (spouse or not) snores like a motorcycle and having a room to stuff them in (or escape to) has a ton of value.

Oh hello my mother-in-law, didn’t expect to see you here… uhhh…

You have to complete a “chore list” for Airbnb stays now? I thought this was a meme or joke.

Why do people put up with this shit, especially on vacation? Why go on vacation to do chores afterwards? May as well stay home and not have to pay for the experience.

I'm more than willing to empty my own trash and wash my own dishes if it means I'm staying in a multi-bedroom house/condo with ample space and amenities.

Staying for more than a few days in a hotel is depressing and claustrophobic.

For single travelers IMO there isn't a good reason to pick Airbnb over a hotel. But there are types of properties that aren't really available widely in hotel-form: the vacation house.

Want to gather with your family in a big house for some holiday? There isn't really anything else other than Airbnb (or Vrbo, which has many of the same issues). Some very heavily vacation-oriented places have hotels that rent out properties of that sort, but in most places this isn't an available product category.

Buuuut even with this said, I'm very hesitant to stay in Airbnbs nowadays.

I just had a terrible experience a month ago - rented a vacation house that had great reviews and looked great. Arrived after a red-eye flight and a long drive... and the lockbox code is wrong. The house is also in the woods so there was no cell reception, so drove a half hour to the nearest area with reception, contacted the host (hosts are never available on Airbnb, naturally), sorted that out, and got into the house... and it was filthy. Top to bottom filthy with air fresheners in every room to cover the smell.

Immediately left and booked a room at the local Hampton Inn, which was overall a far superior experience. Airbnb in all of their grace only gave me ~70% back despite y'know, a totally unusable product. I'm still out over ~$1,000 over the whole thing, and Airbnb seems entirely ok with... what feels a lot like fraud?

The reliability of the Airbnb experience is so poor that I'm at this point completely unwilling to hinge a family vacation on it. It's like rolling a 1d6 and needing to score 3 or above. Just way too risky.

Seems like the Hampton inn suites are the hotel alternative for family vacations. The ones I’m thinking of are basically complete with a fridge, cooking range, and apparently on premise laundry. Being able to get a separate room for kids with a door open between the two is a thing at many places too.

And of course you’re just dealing with a corporation. It’s not someone’s personal home. The management might be weird at a hotel or something but that weirdness would still be spread across many more units-and it has other mechanisms and people in play to normalize the whole experience. AirBnB seems much more ripe for abuse.

Link to the airbnb? Name and shame.

This seems to be a very common experience. I suggested booking an AirBNB for a team off-site a few months ago and heard half a dozen variations on it from a ten person team: code wrong and no host overnight, blatantly misrepresented properties, toilets overflowing upon entry, no power, etc. I haven't travelled much in a good number of years so I was very surprised how much the situation had changed.

I've never experienced the bad ones that want you to clean the place top-to-bottom. I believe they exist, but I've not seen it, and have been averaging probably 4ish AirBnB stays per year for several years (I'm posting from one now!). It's usually like "please load & start the dishwasher and take the trash out before leaving". Reasonable stuff, not, like, hours of work. Most onerous I've seen is stripping the beds and starting the first load of that laundry, which takes maybe ten minutes with several beds and only one person doing it. We tend to do more because we have young kids who make messes, so we clean up after them just so it doesn't turn into a truly unreasonable mess and/or outright damage (and because living in filth isn't pleasant) but that's not because of the chore list.

> Why do people put up with this shit, especially on vacation? Why go on vacation to do chores afterwards? May as well stay home and not have to pay for the experience.

Shrug. The way we use it, it's more like temporarily owning a vacation home than being in a hotel. With the good and the bad of that. Lots of space and beds for way less money than that'd cost in a hotel. Easy access to a washer and dryer, full kitchen, full-size fridge with freezer, and often in locations without any options for normal hotels. Far nicer to hang out in/around than hotel rooms, short of luxury suites and such. But you also can't be quite as messy as some people are comfortable being in a hotel—if we e.g. get crumbs all over the carpet or track a little dirt in, we vacuum it up like we would at home, rather than just grinding it into the fibers and leaving it to the cleaners. We'd do that in hotels, too, if they had a vacuum in the room. It's really not a big deal.

I go on vacation to get away from chores.

I guess I'm not following how people avoid the most time-consuming ones while traveling simply by picking a hotel over an AirBnB. Gotta do laundry (or pay to have it done). Gotta shop for food, cook it, and clean up after (or pay someone else to do that for you). Those aren't an AirBnB vs hotel thing.

The ones we do avoid by staying in hotels or AirBnBs—either—are things like dusting, whole-house floor cleaning, laundering bedding (entirely, in all but one case, and in that exception we only had to do like 5% of the work, it took less time than stopping to refuel the car on a long drive, or many airport security lines), cleaning bathrooms, weeding landscaping beds, mowing the lawn, stuff like that. We get that benefit in both. Basically the same thing you'd get having a once- or twice-a-week cleaning service and a lawn service.

I get that maybe some AirBnBs really do have absurd "chore lists", but nearly all the ones I've stayed at, we're talking like 15 minutes of effort for a whole week, maybe, that might have been avoided by staying in a hotel. Basically, take out the trash and don't leave dirty dishes scattered around the whole house. It's super not a big deal.

If you pick the correct one, you are afforded more privacy, and a cleaner stay, with the con of needing to throw your bedding in the wash and take your takeout trash to the dumpster on the way out.

I don't see the logic in singling out the cleaning fee. I guess it's because AirBnB gives us the opportunity by calling it out as a seperate fee. I always look at the total, including fees. That's the only number I care about and that's what I compare to hotels. I think AirBnB would do themselves a favor by incorporating the cleaning fee into the base price and not calling it out separately.

As for the chore list, I may recall a couple annoying ones from years past, but usually it's a non-issue. Though unfortunately I don't think this is something you know until after you book.

The fees vary wildly, from reasonable to outrageous. Some cleaning fees I've seen are as much as $500. At the time I was looking, these were not shown by Airbnb until checkout. It was an awful experience.

Hotels give no chore lists, though, and I'm not expected to clean. Everyone expects cleaning to be included in the price.

The cleaning fees on AirBnB are dishonest (hidden by default), ridiculously high, and redundant with giant list of chores that make me do all the cleaning anyway. They're predatory and greedy and deserve all the calling out they get.

AirBnB cleaning fees are the same garbage as eBay sales for $1.99, $50 shipping, and should be banned by policy.

Plus you get a bad rating if you miss something on a long list. They should tell me ahead of time that I should schedule an hour to complete all the tasks before I’ve come up with my itinerary with an early morning flight.

> "and should be banned by policy."

This is really the kicker. Not only is the phenomenon really shitty, but Airbnb's refusal to police the practice shows that their interests are firmly aligned against actual guests and instead aligned with hosts.

A lot of the platform's problems come down to this alignment problem. As Airbnb has matured as a service I've found that hosts have gotten lazier and lazier - the chore lists are a relatively recent phenomenon of the last few years. The platform is rife with "hosts" who have no interest in actually running a hospitality business, and are only interested in passive income, and Airbnb itself refuses to uphold any consistent bar and forcing poor hosts off.

This has been wildly destructive to the trustworthiness of the business.

I would be more willing to attribute this stuff to growing pains if I didn't feel like these issues are only symptoms of a significant misalignment between guests and Airbnb corporate.

Fees in general should be banned.

A fee is something additional, tacked on for something special, something that I can avoid.

Like a car rental 'return with have a tank of gas'-fee. I can avoid that.

But I am sick of these websites that show price X, but then tack on 5 fees that I cannot avoid.

Hotels with resort fee. I can't avoid it, ergo it should be part of the base price.

Restaurants with extra fees to pay their people extra. Can't avoid it, should be part of the base price.

It's becoming harder and harder to compare things. Nothing is stopping people from wanting X per night, but advertising X-Y and adding fees to make up for Y. And that is deceptive advertising.

So an interesting note on fees:

These are a result of some jurisdictions, such as certain municipalities, having it within their bylaws/legislation that these fees must be applied and that they must appear as separate line items (like taxes). The result is the effect you see, where the displayed price does not include those fees due to the nature of the rest of the markets not having such fees and coding in those edge cases is like dealing with taxes... A near impossible task to keep up with.

The outcome is that the systems are built to allow such additional fees and by default (or exclusively) they are not included in the base price (which is generally the same across markets).

And thus we have what we have... And some abuse this to add even more fees of course.

I'm sure a billion dollar company with 5,000 employees can't find the time to include a computed "total price" column in their database for total price. Sorry, not buying it.

Something being a separate line item does not mean it can't appear in the total price. You have to intentionally build a system to be that deceptive.

Most non-American jurisdictions include tax in the listed price. Even AirBNB does for German customers: https://i.imgur.com/j7ot5xz.png

Have you ever coded an interjurisdictional taxation system into a web sote?

No, right?

Try it then get back to me.

They need to build that regardless to do business in that area. Once you have it, putting it on the map is not difficult.

Again, they already do this for most other countries.

You're missing the effing point

They wouldn't unless it was legally required...

And that ITS STILL A SEPARATE LINE ITEM NOT INCLUDED IN THE DISPLAY PRICE

Look at my screenshot. For german users, the map display price is $131. That's the $81 base price plus taxes plus fees. All shown in the initial UI where it's easily understood by the user, nothing hidden.

And yet again instead of actually addressing what is said you just keep playing a game by repeating the same argument in various forms

Argumentum Ad Nauseum is generally a type of fallacious conduct

Given this, you're quickly reaching the point where explicit and nearly aggressive derision is deserved

And just to drive home the point:

You are aware how challenging writing a date system is, right?

Well taxes are even worse And have to be updated frequently (often more than once a year).

The cost is absurd.

On the cleaning fee side, I believe if you visit the Australian site, it has them included. You can still set currency to USD or whatever.

Can’t remember if you should book directly or change to .com or whatever to complete the booking.

Shouldn’t be necessary, but gotta do what I gotta do.

> eBay sales for $1.99, $50 shipping, and should be banned by policy.

eBay deprioritizes listings like those, and is generally up-front with fixed&calculated shipping costs.

In an effort to compete with Amazon, eBay really wants sellers to offer free shipping but sellers hate it because it’s often not a fixed cost (especially here in Canada).

eBay used to exclude shipping costs from their commissions. So sellers, like me, used to list things for $0.01 and $X shipping (literally in the title) until eBay caught on.

But nobody was stopping you from paying more for the same item with realistic/free shipping.

The reasoning for showing cleaning separately is so that the daily rate isn't inflated. If I was wondering how many nights to stay, and saw the cost for one night as say $300, then I'd guess five nights would be $1500; in fact though the cleaning cost (usually paid direct to the cleaners) might be $150, and $150 for the accommodation, so five nights total cost would be a more affordable $900.

Edit to add: we have one Airbnb apartment, and zero chores for guests to do; our cleaners get our cleaning fee and we have laundry costs on top of that. Not all Airbnbs are a ripoff.

Right, so including the cleaning fee in the base price would incentivize owners to keep the fees low, as well as creating a much better experience for renters trying to find places in their budget.

AirBNB and the like can still have an edge when you want things like a kitchen or a guaranteed fridge.

What’s the fee difference like for hosts on Airbnb vs vrbo?

VRBO is just as bad as AirBNB if not worse. We had a miserable host who showed up with her dog and stayed in the house until we all left, it was absolutely weird. VRBO removed all of our reviews about it.

Also, lots of hotels have rooms with kitchens in them.

Serious question: if I am on vacation, why do I need a full sized kitchen and fridge? If you are just cooking at the short term rental, and not experiencing the area. Then what’s the point of taking a vacation in the first place?

At most, all you really need is a mini fridge to store take out and alcohol.

The only use case I can think of for having a full kitchen, fridge, and other amenities is for temporary workers. Maybe a company has their consultants stay at an AirBnB with the aforementioned amenities and in an attempt to reel in the costs, will only approve business meals with clients and personal meal expenses if cooked at the STR (ie, grocery store line items).

In most of the world, takeout food isn’t the greatest for health, and possibly dangerous if your immunity doesn’t match the local’s. If you’re on the road often, as GP is, prepping your own food may again be favourable (and doubly so if you have any kind of stringent diet restrictions).

Edit: would add, in some places, your takeout/dining choices vapourize on some days of the week or holidays.

Kids.. You're not going to have a relaxed evening at a different restaurant every day with a three years old.

You sound like you have never traveled with kids :) it’s just convenient not to HAVE to go out for all meals…

Because there's more to travel than just food?

I'm not imposing restaurants with my weird dietary restrictions.

cooking with your friends and family can be fun, relaxing and cheaper than eating out ... imagine an afternoon on a sunny day in a nice backyard, grilling some food, drinking beer/whatever and enjoying the company of your friends and family.

Because not everyone has the same needs and preferences as you:

- Some people like to cook. I ran into a guy on a recent vacation to Lyon (one of the best cities for restaurants in the world) who was in a rental house because he wanted to cook himself at least every other dinner.

- Some people can't afford to eat out every meal and can save a lot by cooking many of their meals

- As others have mentioned: people with families

- Sometimes you're in an area without good eating-out options. If you're in a rural area, your options might be "drive 30m into town" or "wait 1 hour for the exactly one pizza delivery place."

- Sometimes you're in a place for a specific reason, and that reason's not food. For example, I've visited the Tahoe area in California to ski. I'm not there to experience Tahoe cuisine - I'm happy to make simple dinners every night and spend the rest of my time doing what I'm there to do.

There are a ton of reasons to want a full kitchen, depending on your needs + style of travel.

Right, longer stays with kids, AirBnBs are almost always more attractive because there can be a kitchen & more spaces. It's hard to dine out all the time with kids.

when traveling for work why does the cleaning fee factor in, or is it just the chores does your work not book your travel? or do they give you a flat fee and tell you to find your own accommodations and any money extra/left over is your own deal?

I travel 300+ days a year for work. I book my own place to stay using my company credit card.

Never really tested the upper bound of what I’m allowed to pay per night, but I do live comfortably. The megacorp I work for has a booking system we’re supposed to use, but I’ve never used it. I figured if I bend the rules to everyone’s advantage, no one will complain.

Generally I use booking.com(for those sweet sweet miles & more points) or call the establishment directly to get the best possible price.

I've stayed in 30+ airbnb's around the world and I've never encountered the cleaning fee on top of a chore list that is so reviled on reddit and twitter. The only time I had to clean, the host just informed me that there wasn't a cleaning fee so I'd have to do it myself. Still sucked (went out and bought cleaning supplies and took a whole day) but seemed fair.

Interesting. I travel mainly in the US and of the approximately 10 visits I can’t remember an instance where I didn’t pay a cleaning fee while also dealing with a chore list.

It’s pretty sharp in my mind because it always frustrates me so much.

Yeah most of mine were in San Jose, CA, but this was 4 years ago and they were single rooms (not an entire apartment), so I wonder if the practice has grown since then. I still don't like airbnb for other reasons: broken stuff (even in well reviewed places), worsens the housing crisis, poor quality but nice looking furniture. The furniture is "bony."

It is very much a US thing. I've stayed in AirBNBs in India and the US, and a majority of the AirBNBs I've stayed in the US have a cleaning fee, while none of the ones I stayed in India did.

It's a USA thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com